A Site Manager's Week, Written Down

Walk around a mid-size manufacturing site at 9am on a Tuesday and you will usually find the site manager dealing with something that came up overnight. That is not a criticism. It is just what the job looks like when nothing is written down.

Leader standard work is the fix for that. Not a new management philosophy, not a system you need a consultant to install. Just the site manager’s most important weekly activities written down, with enough detail that two different managers would carry them out the same way.

Why carrying it in your head doesn’t hold

Most experienced site managers have a rough sense of what they should be doing each week. The problem is that “rough” compounds. If you are roughly doing a shift review, roughly walking the line, and roughly catching up on downtime numbers, the gaps between what you intend and what actually happens grow quietly. Nobody notices until something goes wrong, and by then it is hard to say exactly where the routine broke down.

Writing it down forces a different kind of honesty. You either did the floor walk or you didn’t. You either reviewed the shift board or you didn’t. A document makes the gap visible in a way that a general sense of how the week went simply cannot.

What belongs in a site manager’s weekly standard

A practical LSW document for a site manager usually covers five categories: production reviews, floor presence, team interactions, data reviews, and a short forward-looking slot.

Production reviews happen daily. The manager is there to confirm the review took place, that gaps were called out, and that someone owns the follow-up. They are not there to troubleshoot every problem themselves.

Floor presence feels like it should happen naturally. It doesn’t, not consistently. Writing it in, with specific days and rough time windows, is the only way to make sure it happens when it should rather than when it’s convenient.

Team interactions include one-to-ones, structured gemba walks with supervisors, and any coaching conversations. These are the first activities to get cancelled when things get busy, which is exactly when they matter most.

Data reviews cover scrap rates, delivery performance, and downtime summaries. Most managers look at these reactively, when a number spikes. Standard work pushes them to look at trends before the spike.

The forward-looking slot is often just thirty minutes on a Friday afternoon. What is coming up next week? Any planned maintenance, cover gaps, customer visits? It sounds obvious, but it rarely happens unless it is written in.

The difference between a list and a standard

Writing down the activities is only half the job. The other half is specifying what done looks like.

A standard that says “walk the production floor” is weaker than one that says “walk the production floor, check the shift plan board for each cell, note any red items, and confirm with the supervisor before leaving the area.” The first is a reminder. The second is a standard.

This is where most LSW documents fall short. They capture the skeleton but not the substance, so every manager interprets the activity differently and the consistency you were hoping for never materialises.

How to start without overcomplicating it

The temptation is to build a comprehensive system before doing anything. Resist it.

Start by asking the site manager to write down what they actually did last week, hour by hour. Then compare it against what they think they should have been doing. The gap between those two lists is your starting point.

From there, agree on five to seven weekly activities that are non-negotiable. Write them down. Attach a brief description of what completing each one looks like. Run it for four weeks without changing anything, then review.

The document itself does not need to be complicated. A single A4 sheet or a simple digital template works fine. The value is in the habit, not the format.

Closing the loop

LSW on its own doesn’t fix anything. A site manager who completes their weekly floor walks but never acts on what they find is going through the motions. Someone, usually the operations director or plant manager, needs to ask each week whether the standard work happened and what it surfaced. That check-in is what keeps the whole thing honest.

LSW also only works when the underlying data is trustworthy. If the standard includes reviewing downtime figures, those figures need to be current and accurate. If you are not yet sure where your biggest visible losses are sitting, running your numbers through https://losses.cadencestandard.com is a useful first step before you decide where a manager’s attention should be focused week to week.

For sites that have the basics in place and want to build further, the six weekly habits at /six/ are a natural complement to a formal LSW document. They cover the behaviours that underpin a consistent routine, not just the routine itself.